Blue Remembered Earth

I'm surprisingly disappointed by this.

I have the general feeling that Reynolds got lost in researching and implementing sci-fi concepts in incredible detail, at the cost of everything else: Story, characters, dialogue, suspense. Some examples:

The high-level story is a kind of scavenger hunt setup that feels very linear, like a quest in a mid-tier RPG. Without spoiling details, it also seems to turns out to be 100% pointless unless I'm missing something.

The two main characters feel incredibly bland, and while they are supposed to be polar opposites in their personal beliefs, you could literally swap their positions and the book wouldn't change. An even worse offender is Jumai, a side character: She's an high-tech salvage expert, an ex of the male lead, and has a bit of an identity crisis. How is this intriguing setup used? She opens one security door (that may as well have not existed as far as the story goes) and has some wholesome small talk with the protagonist. That's it.

The Pans are an important faction in the book. Again without going into spoilers, they are a mysterious, Atlantis-esque, biohacking political power. Interesting! However, below the patina of surface inventions, they could literally be any other organization ever: Umbrella Corp, the Catholic Church, Havard University, the government of Belgium, you name it. In fact, they are two other powerful and rich factions in the book (the Akinya family and Plexus) which feel exactly the same.

The book is not actually lacking pain, terror, grief, injury and death. However, Reynolds seems to go to great pains to have all of these scenes happen either literally off-stage or to describe them in the riveting style of Wikipedia World News. That generates the unfortunate feeling that nothing happens for 85% of the book.

Overall, while I can recommend the author, I cannot recommend this book.

3/5 stars : it's OK

This a slow and gentle book with too many infodumps. I have been spoiled lately with some excellent, modern sci-fi without the dumps, and infodumps feel very kludgy and old fashioned now.
There's plenty of action in this book, and during the last part it was hard to put down.
But it starts slow, and it was hard to actually féél anything for the main characters. Geoffrey and Sunday felt flat for a large part of the book.

I listened to the audiobook version and the happy quasi-african music between the chapters was extremely annoying. It totally didn't fit the theme (apart from the quasi-african part) and that was jarring. Please Audible, take more care with that!
What I loved about the book, especially the audiobook, was that the focus was on Africa. That was the continent where things happened. Not US-centered, but African, yeay! Refreshing, and very much needed. And it got better in the audible version because of the great narrator, who did african accents really well. An american accent would have been wrong in this setting, and fortunately, they did that right!

The story: well, I was told this was a fantastic book. I don't aggree. It's OK. A nice read, too heavy on the infodumps, not enough characterization and the ending needed some polishing. Memphis' death felt contrived and the fact that it actually had been caused by a homocidal elephant was just a deus ex machina, and I hate those.
There were (small) plotholes and oversights galore, and checkov's guns were littering around all over the place.
The third star is mostly for the last part of the story, the Evolvarium and the Winter Queen.
I will read/listen to the next book. I hope that one will be better.

It's been a while since my last sci fi reading. Good read, not brilliant but a good solid story. I am looking forward to the second part of the trilogy hoping it will get better.

Extract from the book

There was another intelligence out there, close enough to touch. And even if they were now gone, then the mere existence of their handiwork was wonder enough to fundamentally change humanity' s view of the universe.

Well, perhaps. The world has absorbed the dizzying lessons of modern science easily enough, hadn't it? Reality was a trick of cognition, an illusion woven by the brain. Beneath the apparently solid skin of the world lay a fizzing unreality of quantum mechanics, playing out on a warped and surreal Salvador Dali landscape. Ghost worlds peeked away from the present with every decision. The universe itself would one day simmer down to absolute entropy stasis, the absolute and literal and of time itself. No action, no memory off an action, no trace of a memory, could endure for ever. Every human deed, from the smallest kindness to the grandest artist achievement, was ultimately pointless.